Bobchillingworth
Unregistered
Oh, don't get me wrong, this has been a good game for my civ, all things considered. I badly underestimated how much maintenance costs would be from even moderate expansion (I should have realized City States was the way to go after everyone else adopted it), but I'm #2 in every category that matters, and am either first or close to it in city count. I've been merrily teching and developing my civ for the last 150+ turns, and now have a decent army of Wizards and can acquire enough mana nodes to (extremely theoretically) win a peaceful Tower victory without ever having to fight anyone.
The problem is that I simply can't see a way to effectively fight Mack, who is far more advanced and has a rather large and dangerous military. I could probably raze up to five of his cities in an alpha-strike, but I think everything would be downhill from there, at least as long as Cairo and Dave are locked into a death struggle and unable to assist. Mack himself currently seems content for both of us to play in our sandboxes; I suspect he wants me to get as strong as I can before he inevitably invades, to give the game some sort of grand climax fighting an opponent who has at least comparable territory.
The ideal time to attack Mack would have been when Auro had him occupied; unfortunately, my economy was in a fairly dire situation when the heaviest fighting was occuring, and I was too busy trying to avoid falling into military strike to accumulate the cash for Adept upgrades. That's entirely my fault, although the cities I was planting during that time are now rather productive.
Mr. Cairo asked me some turns ago for a mutual fish + copper trade, plus traded me Death mana for my Body mana. I know he wants me to attack Dave's barely-defended backlines cities so we can split his territory, but I can't. First, that would mean mobilizing my counter-Mack stack, which could quickly turn disastrous. Second, there's a chance Dave could turn around and slam units into me instead, and he has like 50 Hunters / Horsemen / Mobility Warriors which are dangerous even at this late stage of the game. Third, I'm probably Cairo's next target after Dave is gone. Fourth, I would really rather both of them preserve their armies to prevent Mack from easily eating them, or to intervene if/when the Final War breaks out. I have been accepting just about every trade request both Dave and Cairo send me, beyond the copper trade- it's because I want to signal friendliness, rather than a desire to fuel their conflict. Cairo does have Mobius Witches now, so eventually he'll get lucky with their random free spells and be able to alpha-strike Dave's stacks with Air II collateral and possibly Sun II freezing, enabling him to advance his enormous army of PZ.
So, in sum, I'm not doing badly at all, at least on paper, I'm just struggling to see how I get from "strong second place" to "strong second place with a path to victory, when first place is much further ahead".
